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Comment by tzakrajs | Hacker News Reader

Forget scary. Let's talk about utility. Facebook gives you distraction but Google gives you information (YouTube, Google Search, GMail, Maps, Voice, Fiber, Project Fi, etc) and is more restrictive about how it lets partners use its platform to interact with users.

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This 100%

Google build genuinely useful products, and use the knowledge it gains about you to show (generally somewhat useful) ads, and generally stays out of your way.

Facebook on the other hand desperately tries to manipulate you into consuming as much time as possible on their platform at almost any cost, using lowest common denominator tricks.

It's just kind of a false choice. I use FB to keep in touch and chat with friends, find out about local events, follow various interesting people, etc. google tried to do the same thing with Google Plus and failed. But I certainly don't feel manipulated by FB, I feel they are providing me with a useful service.

I agree with everything you said except for "generally stays out of your way."

Try blocking all Google domains via a hosts file, and you'll see that they have put their hooks into all kinds of systems, and do so in ways that seriously impede how normal web-pages should function.

This. To me, the major problem with FB isn't even privacy. It's the fact that FB relies on, and encourages its users to behave like addicts.

HN has noprocrast because YC has a financial interest in their founders not wasting their time, or becoming addicts. Can you imagine FB implementing noprocrast? It goes against everything they do.

YouTube suggesting extremist videos to people in order to maximize views is giving you “information”? Can we stop pretending Google is somehow more useful to the average person than Facebook?

Yeah, like YouTube might suggest that you do something like more extreme like machine learning if you like Python.

There's been evidence, admittedly anecdotal AFAIK, that YouTube recommendation algorithms can tend towards increasingly extremist content from quite innocuous starting points. For example:

* https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/973716995521748992

* https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/972837152940855296

This doesn't mean YouTube staff are purposefully designing the algorithm to specifically trend towards extremism: this can fall out naturally from human psychology and ML algorithms that note which videos increase engagement and recommend videos based on user interest and recommending videos that will increase the user's time on site.

I think this is worth looking into in a more methodical manner. You can dismiss it as cherry-picking, but I think it's something reasonable people can be concerned about. And these services and products should be looked at separately, determining which parts are good and which parts are bad.

You could write a pseudo-explanation even longer than the comment you are purporting to describe, or you could simply read the words that I wrote and not try to put words in my mouth.

Would the two of you ('jonathanyc and 'kimdcmason) please stop engaging uncharitably with each other? There might be common ground there somewhere, but you're not even trying to listen to each other. It doesn't matter at this point who's right or who's wrong or who started it or who's at fault. You're both contributing to continuing it. As one HN member to another, please help increase civility and substantive discourse.

> "What constructive thing can one say to such a person? This is a serious question."

Probably nothing. If you don't have something constructive to add, don't.

I feel obligated to listen to and respect people who disagree with me on the issue of whether Google and Facebook are evil. But I can get and have gotten intelligent and reasoned perspective from people who aren’t spouting the names of logical fallacies as if they were hexes and caltrops.

As much as I feel obligated to engage with others constructively, I feel obliged to discourage and make others aware of nonconstructive behavior. I take your point that this thread is going nowhere, though, and I will stop. I acknowledge I may have gone too far.

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